Kukla's Korner Hockey

Entries with the tag: ted lindsay

"Alex has earned the right to his fun, he's just won the Stanley Cup and I think he realizes the meaning of that championship. He's as good as anyone in the NHL today. Alex is an honest hockey player who gives you the same effort every night. There are different ways to judge talent: Do you produce every night, or only when you think you should?"

-Ted Lindsay, HHOF member on Alex Ovechkin. Dave Stubbs on NHL.com has more from Lindsay.

"As long as I can keep in good health, I'll do whatever I can and stay involved however I can. Hockey is the greatest game in the world, bar none. You don't hide when you get on the ice. You can't hide. You either show that you've got something, or you don't have anything."

- NHL great Ted Lindsay. Dave Stubbs of NHL.com has much more on Lindsay from Las Vegas.

1925: Ted Lindsay, the left wing on the Detroit Red Wings' famed "Production Line," is born in Renfrew, Ontario. Lindsay makes the Red Wings as a 19-year-old in 1944; by the late 1940s, Lindsay, center Sid Abel and right wing Gordie Howe form 'The Production Line," one of the most famous trios in NHL history. Though he's listed at 5-foot-8, 165 pounds, Lindsay also earns the nickname "Terrible Ted" for his willingness to do anything he has to do to win.

Lindsay is a First-Team NHL All-Star in 1947-48, when he leads the League with 33 goals. He begins a streak of five consecutive seasons as a First-Team All-Star in 1949-50, when he wins the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL's top scorer, and is again a First-Team NHL All-Star in 1955-56 and 1956-57, when he has a career-high 85 points. But Detroit general manager Jack Adams, angered by Lindsay's efforts to help form a players union, trades Lindsay to the Chicago Blackhawks in 1957; he plays three seasons with Chicago before retiring. However, after four years off the ice, he returns to the Red Wings for the 1964-65 season at age 39 and finishes with 14 goals and 28 points, giving him 379 goals and 851 points in 1,068 NHL games. He is inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1966.

“I was very sad to learn today of the passing of my longtime teammate, and friend, Gordie Howe. Gordie really was the greatest hockey player who ever lived. I was fortunate to play with Gordie for 12 seasons with the Detroit Red Wings and I’ve known him for over 70 years. He could do it all in the game to help his team, both offensively and defensively. He earned everything that he accomplished on the ice.

“Beyond hockey, Colleen and his family meant everything to him. Gordie was larger than life, and he was someone who I thought would live forever. My wife Joanne and I extend our condolences to Gordie’s children — Cathleen, Mark, Marty and Murray — and his entire family and many friends during this time.”

Ted Lindsay isn't surprised by fan resentment or growing apathy toward hockey in the U.S. due to an NHL lockout that reached 11 weeks on Sunday.

But, what the Detroit Red Wings legend and players union pioneer discovered during a recent trip to Toronto for the Hockey Hall of Fame festivities shocked him.

“When you see Canadians start to bad-mouth their national game, that tells you something is wrong,'' Lindsay said. “I never heard that before from any Canadians. Hockey is their game and they hate seeing what's happening to it.

“When Bill (Ezinicki) turned pro, it started all over again,” Lindsay said. “He was traded to Boston, and one night we were playing in Detroit and he hit me over the brow with his stick, and there was blood all over the place. We didn’t have helmets or face masks then.

“Anyway, I thought I can’t let the guy get away with it, so I took my stick and whacked him where he whacked me. He drops his gloves and stick, and I thought, ‘Lindsay, you’ve created a mess for yourself now.’

“Well, we got going, and I don’t know where Bill’s mind was that night ... but I knocked two of his teeth out and put 22 stitches in him. The officials separated us. Bill was bleeding, and I was happy.”

Ezinicki broke away from a linesman and the battled started again.

“I jumped on him and straddled him ... and started punching,” Lindsay said. “Gordie (Howe) says, ‘Ted, he’s out.’ I said, ‘I’m going to kill the SOB.’

“After taking a shower, I headed into the first-aid room. I poked my head in and said, ‘You all right, Izzy?’

Truth be known, the six-pack of Lindsay brothers topped her list of unacceptable escorts. Ditto for any Lindsay chums and cohorts, as Ted’s teammate at the pool discovered.

“The Lindsays had a bad reputation, they were a little wild,” Barb explained, juxtaposing the boys’ standing in her family with the memory of Bert Lindsay ushering his nine kids into two pews at Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church for Sunday Mass. “I was told to stay away from them, and that was hard because I was friends with one of Ted’s sisters. But my mother said, ‘If I ever find out a Lindsay walked you home, I’ll find a shotgun and…’”

Ma Moore evidently meant business.

“Those beautiful cars he brought home (from Detroit), none ever went back south with him,” Barb, 78, continued. “One of Ted’s brothers would always end up with a nice used car.

“That light blue convertible certainly got the attention of all the girls,” she added on the snazzy Lincoln, which also put protective mothers like Glen Moore on red alert.

Hockey fans have forever known him as “Terrible” Ted Lindsay, but perhaps it’s time to retire that particular sobriquet, a long four and a half decades after he did the same thing with his playing career.

With the unveiling of the Ted Lindsay Award at the Hockey Hall of Fame Thursday in front of an audience of family and many of his peers in the game, “Venerable” seems a more fitting prefix. The 84-year-old Lindsay has his own locker space in the present-day Red Wings’ dressing room, his No. 7 jersey hangs from the Joe Louis Arena rafters and now a bronze-on-maple trophy named for him replaces the one in former Prime Minister Lester Pearson’s name since 1970, awarded to the NHL Players’ Association’s most outstanding player.

“It’s beautiful,” said Lindsay, who with his wife Joanne provided input to designer Myros Trutiak’s creation. “I wanted a little character to it, and I think the colour in it, the wing and the wheel on the chest is very important to me.

“It goes to the best, voted on by his peers. So that means there’s no politics involved. That tells you the whole story – whoever wins it is entitled to it.”

“This is a great honour to have bestowed upon me. I took great pride in my hockey career, both on the ice competing towards a championship with my teammates, and off of the ice for the work that we did to ensure our fellow players enjoyed proper rights and benefits.

“I am very proud and appreciative that the most outstanding player each season, as voted by his peers, will receive the award with my name on it.”

-Ted Lindsay at the ceremony today announcing the renaming the Lester B. Pearson Award to the Ted Lindsay Award. More from the NHLPA.

“That was the biggest scam job, execution, that I’ve ever seen in my life.”

This was how Hockey Hall of Famer and former NHLPA builder Ted Lindsay described the evalution and subsequent firing of former NHLPA executive director Paul Kelly in an interview Thursday with TSN’s Darren Dreger and Bill Watters on AM 640 Toronto Radio.

Lindsay was in Chicago last week for union meetings that resulted in Kelly’s dismissal and, though he sat in on few of the discussions, said he was dismayed by what he did see.

“I was thinking, boy, this is really a cruxifiction of Paul Kelly that’s going on.”

Terrible Ted, who’ll be 84 a month after this year’s final ends, answered his cellphone Wednesday and began firing on all cylinders at what he called “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of in my life” — his Red Wings, beat up and exhausted after their 2-1, Game 5 elimination of the Chicago Blackhawks on Wednesday, having to go back at it three days later.

“Is this supposed to be the premium event of the National Hockey League, or not?” said Lindsay, who played in that 1955 series, scored four goals in Game 2, a finals record at the time, and remembers the Saturday-Sunday games as not being any better an idea then than it is now.

“Except we were so stupid, we didn’t know anything different,” he said….

“These guys have just gone through three very tough series — played probably the best team in the league other than them, in Anaheim, just finished another hard series and now you’re going to have one tired team with a lot of injuries. Pittsburgh’s probably not as tired because they had a fairly easy time of it, but they’re only getting one more day’s rest.”

added 10:02pm, How about the opinion of Adam Brady of Ducks Blog at AnaheimDucks.com,

So the Red Wings are one step closer to becoming the first team to repeat as champions since ... the Red Wings (in 1997 and 98). They take on the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Stanley Cup Final for (yawn) the second straight season….

But the back-to-back games are another story, at least according to Old Man Chelios. “You don’t want my opinion on that,’’ Chelios said.

You know what, Cheli? You’re right. We really don’t.

In fact, all of you complaining about the back-to-backs, get over yourself. Frankly, the whining is more than a little tiresome.

It was nice to see the NHL borrow an idea from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science people – among other organizations – in coming up with a Lifetime Achievement Award….

Going forward, there are many worthy candidates for this award as the NHL closes in on its 100th year. Selecting anyone other than Mr. Hockey in Year 1 would have been a mistake. But in future seasons, Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky, Scotty Bowman and Jean Beliveau are just a few names we’ll be seeing win this award.

It’ll be interesting to see how the NHL handles the legacy of Ted Lindsay. Not only was ‘Terrible Ted’ one of the best players of all-time – he ranked No. 21 on The Hockey News’ 1997 list of the top 100 players – he was also the instigator of the grossly underpaid players’ attempt to form an association/union back in 1957.

The Montreal Canadiens commemorated their 81 year-old rivalry with the Detroit Red Wings before the two Original Six teams played their only game of the season Tuesday.

It is that disparity in the NHL’s current schedule that has Red Wings Hall of Famer Ted Lindsay believing that Detroit will never have a similar rivalry with another team ever again.

Lindsay said Tuesday that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is to blame if attendance numbers are down in Detroit because fans in Hockeytown are sick of seeing teams like Columbus and Nashville so often every year.

“We had it for a couple of years there with Colorado and Detroit, but Bettman has taken advantage of Detroit because of it being a great hockey city and it being a well managed hockey team,” Lindsay said.

No man on skates was ever too big or too tough for Ted Lindsay to challenge. At 5’8” and 160lbs he used his big stick and his fists to cut down some of the biggest meanest men in National Hockey League history.

He was known as Scarface or Terrible Ted. The scars on his rugged face represented his courage in his many on ice battles. How many scars he can’t tell you, because he lost count after 400 stitches.

continued…(*a look at Lindsay’s career and his role in forming the NHLPA)